Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

...praise be–diagrams of her arcane folding techniques. These things made the book worthwhile for me. The book itself is interesting as an object. It’s smallish, and pretty. Inside, the illustrations are Japanese-cute line drawings. It doesn’t look like any cleaning or organization book I’ve ever seen, and that is what makes it special. Kondo understands that tidying is a spiritual activity, not an organizational activity. The same week we got this b...

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Book Review: An Everlasting Meal

...also on track with last week’s posts about cheap eating and beans. Adler’s book is not a cookbook. It has recipes throughout, but its mission is more about imparting an attitude, a style, a way of thinking in the kitchen, than delivering recipes. In fact, the core of her message is that you don’t need a recipe to cook. I was attracted to this book because it is reportedly inspired by M.F.K. Fisher’s book, How to Cook a Wolf, which is one of my fav...

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My Morning Routine: Tarrying With the Negative

...has created his own version of Good Reads using Airtable to track all the books he digests. I won’t be offended if you skip these reviews or feel they are “off topic.” And a disclaimer: I’m an amateur and I don’t necessarily endorse an author’s entire work because a review appears on this blog. We begin with Slavoj Žižek’s Tarrying With the Negative, but first . . . What I’ve learned about difficult reading Tarrying With the Negative is not a bea...

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Book Review: What the Robin Knows

...ould otherwise have fled our presence long before. Most of all I like this book because he asks a lot of you. At one point in the book he’s talking about how there’s no formula for this stuff, just lots of dedication and time, and notes, “The lifelong learning curve is the ultimate appeal of what we do.” This made me laugh out loud. Appeal? The notion of working on one skill all your life (especially one as unglamorous as robin-watching) is not a...

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Everything Must Go Part II: Books

...the first steps on Kondosans’ path to a tidy house is to go through one’s books. We managed to accumulate more books than our shelves could hold. An untidy and anxiety producing book pile had developed in the living room. It was time for a book cleansing. But let me first state our rule about buying books. My gym is mere steps from the Los Angeles Central Library from which I can easily access over 6.2 million books, movies, CDs and downloadable...

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